“Being There”: Proximity, Organization, and Culture in the Development and Adoption of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work on innovation and technology implementation suggests the importance of closeness between collaborating parties for the successful development and adoption of new technologies. “Closeness” is used here both in the literal sense, as allowing more frequent, effective, often unplanned interaction, and more broadly, to encompass common language, modes of communication, customs, conventions, and social norms. Such relationships are said to be particularly important in the case of production process innovations. These theoretical ideas are subjected to empirical scrutiny through a postal survey and set of interviews with users of advanced manufacturing technologies in Southern Ontario. Given the premise that intensive interaction and collaboration between users and producers of advanced process technologies is necessary for successful technology implementation to occur, then the chronically underdeveloped state of the Ontario advanced machinery sector ought to create major difficulties for manufacturers there trying to implement leading-edge processes. The analysis indicates that “closeness” between user and producer, defined physically, organizationally, and “culturally,” is important for the successful implementation of these advanced technologies. The paper suggests a set of circumstances in which proximity of the user to the producer is most important. In doing so, it offers an interpretation of “culture” that goes beyond common language, codes of communication, and norms to incorporate shared workplace practices and training regimes. The paper concludes that industrial policies based on free trade in industrial machinery will be inadequate, on their own, to ensure that firms in mature regions make effective use of advanced process technologies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".